My friends definitely did. Granted, we had varying taste in music so there was always a little bit of something for everyone. If we only played it single player we might only have bought a quarter or less of everything.

Sims on the other hand, a lot of expansion packs are features from prior games cut up into small chunks and given new animations then sold for ridiculous amounts of money. After sims 3 I promised myself to never buy another sims game knowing damn well it would just be a constant drain on my wallet if I ever wanted to stay current or enjoy anything close to a complete experience. You certainly can enjoy just the vanilla base game, but everyone who ever played this series before knows you most of the expansion packs if you want to play as intended and experience the good stuff.